I started getting SI because of extra United Airline miles I could use up. I find the magazine an enjoyable read because I’m a sports guy, but also because they tell great stories, and sport is ready made for compelling stories. But some people might think I get it for the swimsuit issue, which is not true. I thought it interesting in the weeks before that issue came out that there was a notice in the magazine to not get that issue if it was something you preferred not to see. I commend SI for that, but I didn’t take advantage of it and got mine last week.

The first thing I noticed was how young all these ladies were. As beautiful as they all are, I’m afraid to say they no longer do much for me. When you get past half a century, 20 year olds look like, well, 20 year olds, veritable children. Maybe it also has to do with my having a 20 year old daughter, I don’t know. I’m sure there are quite a few folks of a religious bent who are offended by such a show of seductive flesh, and I can certainly understand that. Thus SI’s opt out option, but I actually, although being a religious sort, think the SI swimsuit issue tells us something good about American culture.

Bringing up my age again, I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and when I was in my 20s in the 1980s radical feminism was in its heyday. Thoughts would run through my and many other guys’ brains, “Should I open that door for her?” Or “Can I write the word ‘lady’ and not offend someone,” and so on. It was stifling and most of we normal people thought stupid. Men and women are different, for gosh sakes! Indeed it was a cultural watershed event that on the January 20, 1992 issue of Time Magazine cover was this astounding statement: “Why Are Men and Women Different? It isn’t just upbringing. New studies show that they were born that way.” We need a study to show us that? Really? Well, our secularized liberal cultural elites do, because they are not very fond of reality as we find it. (And this was almost as big a cultural watershed moment as when the April 1993 issue of The Atlantic proclaimed on its cover, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” You had to live through that time to know just how despised the vice president was by those same elites.)

These elites will always only come to reality kicking and screaming (witness the drive to re-define marriage) but come they must. Reality can only be mocked so long. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today has a fantastic piece about “why the left can’t handle social conservatism,”  He argues that radical feminism and the sexual revolution have deleterious consequences and the left has no political answer, other than to continue to grow the welfare state. Good luck with that. Thus social conservatism is “on the right side of history,” mainly because that’s the way the world works.

I find it reassuring having lived through the height of modern liberal delusions about the malleability of human nature that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue still exists. Since 1964’s first swimsuit edition and for as long as we human beings exist, men will be men and women will be women, and it’s no longer controversial to say it, because believe it or not, not so long ago it was.